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There exist plenty of equivalent-or-better alternatives that don't pull shady shit like this. Your tools should serve you, not the other way around. Zulip: htt

There exist plenty of equivalent-or-better alternatives that don't pull shady shit like this. Your tools should serve you, not the other way around. Zulip: https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/ Rocket: https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ Riot: https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/ Mattermost: https://mattermost.org/ https://mattermost.org/

KMnO4 7y ago
Sadly none of those are alternatives if you don’t have a say in what your workplace uses.
- gruez 7y ago
  If that's the case: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ (native slack client) https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ (cloud irc client, they have slack integration if you pay for premium)
  - SaltyBackendGuy 7y ago
    I tried to use ripcord for about a month. There were several features that I really liked (for example - tabs are amazing imo). The deal breaker ultimately was that I didn't receive all of my notifications which was a problem for work. But I would love to try it again if they solve that problem. Edit: The hotkeys and the lightweight feel to it was also amazing BTW.
    - tumult 7y ago
      Do you have a way to reproduce it, even unreliably? Or any other info? If so, could you email me cancel@cancel.fm ? The Slack server determines most notifications that the client is supposed to display -- the logic all runs on the server, and is sent as explicit events to the client. So, the only way that Ripcord would be losing notifications for standard chat messages is if the server did not send the notification events, or the connection went down for several minutes and had to be restarted without an event replay. But if you have any lead on a way to show that notifications aren't being displayed, that would be really useful information. I've heard of some people using Ripcord on Windows 10 having some kind of automatic suppression of notifications occur at the the OS level. Probably some automated anti-user-spam thing. In which case, the notifications would only be listed internally within Ripcord, but not in the OS notifications list. Is that the case, or were they also not visible within Ripcord's own notifications list? (This one isn't relevant if you're using Mac or Linux.)
      - katmannthree 7y ago
        Is there a way you could enable touch events for scrolling the chat history? I'm using a Surface and trying to touch scroll just selects messages. Other than that my first impressions are pretty good.
        tumult 7y ago
        I'm actually not sure why this isn't working for a Surface running Windows. I would have assumed that it would emulate mousewheel events. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wintouch/windows-touch-gestures-overview#interpreting-windows-touch-gestures https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wintouch/wind... I'm guessing this is what needs to be handled. I wonder if Qt is already interacting with this system, and I'm handling it improperly on Win32. Does scrolling with touch gestures work for you in other types of scrollable views, such as the sidebar, or the workspace files list?
        katmannthree 7y ago
        It seems to be an issue with Qt, I just checked a bunch of the example applications and none of them allow touch-based scrolling. There's also this, an open 5 year old bug report. https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40461 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40461
        tumult 7y ago
        OK. I will see if I can find a way to emulate a touch device like this one on Windows for testing. I can pre-empt Qt's input system for these types of events and handle them manually in Ripcord's own application code.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Seconding, please do. I'm a paying Ripcord user working on a Dell 2-in-1 (essentially a Surface clone with a better price tag), and I miss proper touch (and pen) handling too - to the point that I started looking into fixing this on my own with AutoHotkey (I'm thinking of an always-on-top semi-transparent area I could touch / pen over, which would translate this into appropriate mouse events to send to Ripcord to make it scroll). But it would be vastly better if I didn't need to do this :). Oh, and since I have you here: would it be possible for you to look into the group DM handling? We run plenty of group DMs at work, and I have two problems with them: one, they tend to randomly disappear from the sidebar, and two, there seems to be no way to start a group DM from Ripcord. Also, again, thank you for your hard work.
    - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
      For me the dealbreaker was the visuals; I've been spoiled by years of good looking webapps or native (ios, macos) ones. You can't get away with making a chat client look like 90's IRC clients anymore, imo.
      - ubercow13 7y ago
        Many people prefer that. Slack is a total eyesore, IMO.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Personally, I like it this way. I like my apps how Tufte like his charts: information-dense, free of chartjunk.
  - cerberusss 7y ago
    Great tip, thanks!
hanniabu 7y ago
Having tried Rocket, Riot, and Mattermost before, it's of my opinion as well as everyone that I work with that Discord blows them away. It's so much more polished.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  Speaking as the project lead for Riot, I agree... for now :) The difference (relative to Discord) is that Riot is FOSS and the sky is the limit in terms of how fast it evolves. These days Riot/Web, Riot/iOS and RiotX/Android are both straightforward and fun to hack on - and we do everything we can to encourage and merge good contributions and features from the community. As per the 2020 section at the end of https://matrix.org/blog/2019/12/24/the-2019-matrix-holiday-update/ https://matrix.org/blog/2019/12/24/the-2019-matrix-holiday-u..., our top priority for next year is to get the UX of Riot to be as mainstream as possible (ie as good or better than Discord), and we need all the help we can get. The company which funds most of Riot’s development (vector.im) is also hiring currently for UX Designers and developers to work fulltime on this. TL;DR: If Linux can obsolete Solaris, Riot can obsolete Discord/Slack. Come get involved and help :)
  - kenniskrag 7y ago
    What do you recommend as server software for riot? I had some problems with the various bridges which the default server currently provides. Is the default server also provided with synapse?
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      Synapse is the best server for now, and works relatively well (resource usage has improved lots over the last year). Bridges plug into the server, and there’s typically at least one good one per protocol: matrix-appservice-irc, matrix-appservice-slack, mautrix-telegram, mautrix-whatsapp etc. We need to improve the UX for provisioning and managing bridges though; atm it’s mix of config files and bot commands.
      - 7y ago
CydeWeys 7y ago
Plenty of workplaces are paying good money to use Slack. If I were paying for it I wouldn't stand for this at all.
- ken 7y ago
  I would guess that the vast majority didn’t start by creating a solid plan for transitioning their data off Slack.
  - StevePerkins 7y ago
    Honestly, how much data would the typical company need to transition off? Some photos, docs, code snippets? Most companies do use those features to some extent, but it should be fairly ephemeral. If you're using pinned messages as a WIKI, then you are really using the tool incorrectly. Channels and memberships? If you made all of my company's channels disappear tomorrow, you'd be doing us a favor. We'd re-create the ones that matter within a few hours, and the other 90% didn't really need to exist anyway. The only really true "sticky" part of Slack are webhook integrations. Some companies really do setup some degree of workflow automation around those things. But most of the time, it's just bot-spam. The CEO wants everyone to belong to a #wins channel, which gets a spam alert whenever a sales guy qualifies a lead, etc.
    - txcwpalpha 7y ago
      >Honestly, how much data would the typical company need to transition off? In many cases, all of it. Data retention laws require many companies retain copies of certain types of internal company communications for extended time periods. This is why some companies have policies that discussions about topics such as company finances or government contracts have to be done via more easily archived channels. But if your company doesn't have those policies and you just use Slack for everything, then everything in Slack has to be retained on the off chance that someone discussed an upcoming earnings report in your company Slack.
xg15 7y ago
> There exist plenty of equivalent-or-better alternatives that don't pull shady shit like this. ... until investors/"the market"/whatever else forces them to also pull shady shit like this.
- jdc 7y ago
  Pretty sure at least half that list is FOSS
tootie 7y ago
I absolutely don't understand why chat is such a lucrative market. All the products are nearly identical. All the most useful features of Slack were available in IRC.
- jfim 7y ago
  There are some features that aren't available on basic IRC, such as search, history, message emoji responses, message reminders, threading, rich integrations (eg. actionable notifications, polls, etc.) and so on.
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    Emoji works on IRC.
    - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
      But custom ones require a lot of work / effort which nobody wants to do. And not all IRC clients support emoji.
      - ken 7y ago
        There’s always some (client, feature) tuple that isn’t supported. This very post is about Slack’a own web client not supporting smartphones!
  - CriticalCathed 7y ago
    Aside from Rich Integration (which is arguably also there if you include bots/scripting), most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders. What's missing I think is a pretty UI and lots of marketing.
    - dmitriid 7y ago
      > most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders. Keyword: most. So: not all of them. So, there will be a mismatch and a mish-mash between features. Lets' talk about search and history. How about synchronised history and search across devices? Mobile? Available to new clients that just connected? At this point someone on HN suggests IRCCloud... which is exactly the same as Slack (proprietary chat-as-a-service).
city41 7y ago
Pretty much no one who uses Slack, chooses Slack. The companies we work for do. I despise Slack, yet I use it all day, every week day. It's quite the predicament.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  For me this was different years ago, when Slack helped our company's people (consultancy) to find each other and share knowledge much more effectively than the previous method, mailing lists. In a number of companies / assignments, Slack was introduced "from the trenches" and adopted officially later on. You don't get a tool to rise up from the trenches if it doesn't fulfill a need - that other, comparable tools also fill, especially now that a number of good competitors have jumped on the wagon.
- becauseiam 7y ago
  I disagree - in a lot of corporate environments, it once snuck in as shadow IT to work around the then incumbent, infosec certified approved solution of less usable. Slack has become the new corporate mandated unusable messaging application.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    So the official solution was proprietary garbage. Shadow IT replaces it by an equally proprietary workaround. That workaround is the underdog so the companies that owns it actually has to allow its workers to make it good if it wants so succeed. It's officially adopted making it the incumbent. Now the company can stop to pretend caring about quality and start digging moats. Predictably, the proprietary workaround becomes proprietary garbage. And no problem was solved after all. Will we ever learn?
    - becauseiam 7y ago
      I think you're overlooking the quality measure of the proprietary garbage as it evolves over time. Slack, in comparison to say Lync, or Skype has made huge moves towards better usability. But for a company like Slack determined to maintain market share, to control the user experience for all its users (whether they want to be users or not) is repeating the same mistakes, not necessarily the corporations signing contracts and writing cheques. Slack is not the end solution. It's a step in the direction to being less terrible in the realm of corporate communication, and will be replaced by something else that does better in the future. For now it'll hold on whilst it still can.
alexott 7y ago
Rocket is a nightmare comparing to Slack...
- sschueller 7y ago
  Why? Other than their move to non-native android I find Rocket quite good.
  - vladimirralev 7y ago
    Rocket developed many issues with missing notifications and messages for me over time. No push notifications on mobile when a desktop is connected. Overall things fail intermittently especially when multiple clients are connected for the same user. At some point it stopped respecting some settings about the per-room notifications.
    - RyJones 7y ago
      My experiences both as a Slack org owner and a Rocket org owner - I'd set aside my personal dislike for Slack to use it over Rocket ten times out of 10. The admin tools for Rocket are really sub par.
NelsonMinar 7y ago
You're awfully optimistic with 'equivalent or better'.

KMnO4 7y ago

Sadly none of those are alternatives if you don’t have a say in what your workplace uses.

gruez 7y ago
If that's the case: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ (native slack client) https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ (cloud irc client, they have slack integration if you pay for premium)
- SaltyBackendGuy 7y ago
  I tried to use ripcord for about a month. There were several features that I really liked (for example - tabs are amazing imo). The deal breaker ultimately was that I didn't receive all of my notifications which was a problem for work. But I would love to try it again if they solve that problem. Edit: The hotkeys and the lightweight feel to it was also amazing BTW.
  - tumult 7y ago
    Do you have a way to reproduce it, even unreliably? Or any other info? If so, could you email me cancel@cancel.fm ? The Slack server determines most notifications that the client is supposed to display -- the logic all runs on the server, and is sent as explicit events to the client. So, the only way that Ripcord would be losing notifications for standard chat messages is if the server did not send the notification events, or the connection went down for several minutes and had to be restarted without an event replay. But if you have any lead on a way to show that notifications aren't being displayed, that would be really useful information. I've heard of some people using Ripcord on Windows 10 having some kind of automatic suppression of notifications occur at the the OS level. Probably some automated anti-user-spam thing. In which case, the notifications would only be listed internally within Ripcord, but not in the OS notifications list. Is that the case, or were they also not visible within Ripcord's own notifications list? (This one isn't relevant if you're using Mac or Linux.)
    - katmannthree 7y ago
      Is there a way you could enable touch events for scrolling the chat history? I'm using a Surface and trying to touch scroll just selects messages. Other than that my first impressions are pretty good.
      - tumult 7y ago
        I'm actually not sure why this isn't working for a Surface running Windows. I would have assumed that it would emulate mousewheel events. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wintouch/windows-touch-gestures-overview#interpreting-windows-touch-gestures https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wintouch/wind... I'm guessing this is what needs to be handled. I wonder if Qt is already interacting with this system, and I'm handling it improperly on Win32. Does scrolling with touch gestures work for you in other types of scrollable views, such as the sidebar, or the workspace files list?
        katmannthree 7y ago
        It seems to be an issue with Qt, I just checked a bunch of the example applications and none of them allow touch-based scrolling. There's also this, an open 5 year old bug report. https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40461 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40461
        tumult 7y ago
        OK. I will see if I can find a way to emulate a touch device like this one on Windows for testing. I can pre-empt Qt's input system for these types of events and handle them manually in Ripcord's own application code.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Seconding, please do. I'm a paying Ripcord user working on a Dell 2-in-1 (essentially a Surface clone with a better price tag), and I miss proper touch (and pen) handling too - to the point that I started looking into fixing this on my own with AutoHotkey (I'm thinking of an always-on-top semi-transparent area I could touch / pen over, which would translate this into appropriate mouse events to send to Ripcord to make it scroll). But it would be vastly better if I didn't need to do this :). Oh, and since I have you here: would it be possible for you to look into the group DM handling? We run plenty of group DMs at work, and I have two problems with them: one, they tend to randomly disappear from the sidebar, and two, there seems to be no way to start a group DM from Ripcord. Also, again, thank you for your hard work.
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    For me the dealbreaker was the visuals; I've been spoiled by years of good looking webapps or native (ios, macos) ones. You can't get away with making a chat client look like 90's IRC clients anymore, imo.
    - ubercow13 7y ago
      Many people prefer that. Slack is a total eyesore, IMO.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Personally, I like it this way. I like my apps how Tufte like his charts: information-dense, free of chartjunk.
- cerberusss 7y ago
  Great tip, thanks!

hanniabu 7y ago

Having tried Rocket, Riot, and Mattermost before, it's of my opinion as well as everyone that I work with that Discord blows them away. It's so much more polished.

Arathorn 7y ago
Speaking as the project lead for Riot, I agree... for now :) The difference (relative to Discord) is that Riot is FOSS and the sky is the limit in terms of how fast it evolves. These days Riot/Web, Riot/iOS and RiotX/Android are both straightforward and fun to hack on - and we do everything we can to encourage and merge good contributions and features from the community. As per the 2020 section at the end of https://matrix.org/blog/2019/12/24/the-2019-matrix-holiday-update/ https://matrix.org/blog/2019/12/24/the-2019-matrix-holiday-u..., our top priority for next year is to get the UX of Riot to be as mainstream as possible (ie as good or better than Discord), and we need all the help we can get. The company which funds most of Riot’s development (vector.im) is also hiring currently for UX Designers and developers to work fulltime on this. TL;DR: If Linux can obsolete Solaris, Riot can obsolete Discord/Slack. Come get involved and help :)
- kenniskrag 7y ago
  What do you recommend as server software for riot? I had some problems with the various bridges which the default server currently provides. Is the default server also provided with synapse?
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    Synapse is the best server for now, and works relatively well (resource usage has improved lots over the last year). Bridges plug into the server, and there’s typically at least one good one per protocol: matrix-appservice-irc, matrix-appservice-slack, mautrix-telegram, mautrix-whatsapp etc. We need to improve the UX for provisioning and managing bridges though; atm it’s mix of config files and bot commands.
    - 7y ago

CydeWeys 7y ago

Plenty of workplaces are paying good money to use Slack. If I were paying for it I wouldn't stand for this at all.

ken 7y ago
I would guess that the vast majority didn’t start by creating a solid plan for transitioning their data off Slack.
- StevePerkins 7y ago
  Honestly, how much data would the typical company need to transition off? Some photos, docs, code snippets? Most companies do use those features to some extent, but it should be fairly ephemeral. If you're using pinned messages as a WIKI, then you are really using the tool incorrectly. Channels and memberships? If you made all of my company's channels disappear tomorrow, you'd be doing us a favor. We'd re-create the ones that matter within a few hours, and the other 90% didn't really need to exist anyway. The only really true "sticky" part of Slack are webhook integrations. Some companies really do setup some degree of workflow automation around those things. But most of the time, it's just bot-spam. The CEO wants everyone to belong to a #wins channel, which gets a spam alert whenever a sales guy qualifies a lead, etc.
  - txcwpalpha 7y ago
    >Honestly, how much data would the typical company need to transition off? In many cases, all of it. Data retention laws require many companies retain copies of certain types of internal company communications for extended time periods. This is why some companies have policies that discussions about topics such as company finances or government contracts have to be done via more easily archived channels. But if your company doesn't have those policies and you just use Slack for everything, then everything in Slack has to be retained on the off chance that someone discussed an upcoming earnings report in your company Slack.

xg15 7y ago

> There exist plenty of equivalent-or-better alternatives that don't pull shady shit like this. ... until investors/"the market"/whatever else forces them to also pull shady shit like this.

jdc 7y ago
Pretty sure at least half that list is FOSS

tootie 7y ago

I absolutely don't understand why chat is such a lucrative market. All the products are nearly identical. All the most useful features of Slack were available in IRC.

jfim 7y ago
There are some features that aren't available on basic IRC, such as search, history, message emoji responses, message reminders, threading, rich integrations (eg. actionable notifications, polls, etc.) and so on.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Emoji works on IRC.
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    But custom ones require a lot of work / effort which nobody wants to do. And not all IRC clients support emoji.
    - ken 7y ago
      There’s always some (client, feature) tuple that isn’t supported. This very post is about Slack’a own web client not supporting smartphones!
- CriticalCathed 7y ago
  Aside from Rich Integration (which is arguably also there if you include bots/scripting), most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders. What's missing I think is a pretty UI and lots of marketing.
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    > most IRC clients have search, history, emoji, and reminders. Keyword: most. So: not all of them. So, there will be a mismatch and a mish-mash between features. Lets' talk about search and history. How about synchronised history and search across devices? Mobile? Available to new clients that just connected? At this point someone on HN suggests IRCCloud... which is exactly the same as Slack (proprietary chat-as-a-service).

city41 7y ago

Pretty much no one who uses Slack, chooses Slack. The companies we work for do. I despise Slack, yet I use it all day, every week day. It's quite the predicament.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
For me this was different years ago, when Slack helped our company's people (consultancy) to find each other and share knowledge much more effectively than the previous method, mailing lists. In a number of companies / assignments, Slack was introduced "from the trenches" and adopted officially later on. You don't get a tool to rise up from the trenches if it doesn't fulfill a need - that other, comparable tools also fill, especially now that a number of good competitors have jumped on the wagon.
becauseiam 7y ago
I disagree - in a lot of corporate environments, it once snuck in as shadow IT to work around the then incumbent, infosec certified approved solution of less usable. Slack has become the new corporate mandated unusable messaging application.
- anoncake 7y ago
  So the official solution was proprietary garbage. Shadow IT replaces it by an equally proprietary workaround. That workaround is the underdog so the companies that owns it actually has to allow its workers to make it good if it wants so succeed. It's officially adopted making it the incumbent. Now the company can stop to pretend caring about quality and start digging moats. Predictably, the proprietary workaround becomes proprietary garbage. And no problem was solved after all. Will we ever learn?
  - becauseiam 7y ago
    I think you're overlooking the quality measure of the proprietary garbage as it evolves over time. Slack, in comparison to say Lync, or Skype has made huge moves towards better usability. But for a company like Slack determined to maintain market share, to control the user experience for all its users (whether they want to be users or not) is repeating the same mistakes, not necessarily the corporations signing contracts and writing cheques. Slack is not the end solution. It's a step in the direction to being less terrible in the realm of corporate communication, and will be replaced by something else that does better in the future. For now it'll hold on whilst it still can.

alexott 7y ago

Rocket is a nightmare comparing to Slack...

sschueller 7y ago
Why? Other than their move to non-native android I find Rocket quite good.
- vladimirralev 7y ago
  Rocket developed many issues with missing notifications and messages for me over time. No push notifications on mobile when a desktop is connected. Overall things fail intermittently especially when multiple clients are connected for the same user. At some point it stopped respecting some settings about the per-room notifications.
  - RyJones 7y ago
    My experiences both as a Slack org owner and a Rocket org owner - I'd set aside my personal dislike for Slack to use it over Rocket ten times out of 10. The admin tools for Rocket are really sub par.

NelsonMinar 7y ago

You're awfully optimistic with 'equivalent or better'.